As Is The Feeling,
So Is The Result.
What should happen is happening.
A saying about generalship is that it includes the assumption that an enemy has done, is doing, and will do what he should do to defeat you. Lee’s maneuvering to keep Grant’s Overland Campaign away from Richmond exemplifies this aspect of generalship. MacArthur’s maneuvering to keep the Imperial Japanese Army from Port Moresby — aided by Fletcher’s strategic victory on the Coral Sea — also exemplifies this aspect of generalship.
Life is warfare. Conflict is the father of all things – Heraclitus. Each person must practice generalship in order to defeat their enemies: fear, envy, anger. Generalship includes knowing what an enemy should do to defeat you and anticipating his move to do just that.
Fear, envy, and anger share a common tactic: make you uneasy, restless, dissatisfied, unhappy, thinking something is amiss that needs fixing. These enemies also seek to own a huge and powerful war-making formation, a daunting soldiery that you, actually, own: your mind.
To defeat you, fear, envy, and anger should own your mind. Expect them, therefore, to be seeking exactly that with everything they have, deploying every trick of deception they know, all day every day, to own your mind. There is your prime and really only enemy as you go through life. To own your mind is where they are trying to go and that is where you must go to get there first, to own the joint yourself, because it is yours. Beat them to your own treasure before they can steal it, or, throw them off your treasure even if they already exult over some parts of it.
Jill St. John
Your treasure is yours, not theirs. This takes generalship. Knowledge of the intel just stated — it is both strategic and tactical — is vital to the success of your generalship. You know where the enemy is going, you know what they are going to do and why, you know how they do it and when, and you know who they are. Now go beat ’em.
Life is a battlefield on which you and fear, envy, and anger fight for control of your mind. They want it, but it belongs to you. You have to keep them from getting it even if they are using parts of it already against you. This takes generalship. You have to know or learn how to liberate your mind from foreign force, from fear, envy, and anger.
This is easier to do than you might think. Get there first. Own your own mind before fear, envy, and anger can snatch it. Even if fear, envy, and anger already gnaw at some parts of your mind, use the parts you own to drive them out. More is there for you to work with than you may think. More and better soldiery you have just in your mind — your trump force being in your heart — than you perhaps expect to have. Chief among these is reason, logic, and second among them is discrimination, discernment.
Your mind wants to be owned by you, not by foreigners. Your mind is your friend until you do not own it. Your mind wants to be whistle-clean, relaxed, confident, worry-less, strong, ready to serve you. It is very powerful. What mind does not belong to its master or wants to be unhappy or weak?
You and your mind have an ally, someone who wants to help and support, even guide and improve, your generalship. That is, so long as you expend every possible effort and resource to practice it. This ally answers questions and clears obstacles in the pathway of your active general-ing. He takes directions well. In fact, He yearns to receive orders and is eager to obey them. He Himself is free of fear, envy, and anger. So He is safe company for you and your mind.
He lives inside you, not outside you. He lives in something else you own, the trump card you have to play against fear, envy, and anger, even when they own a part of your mind. That is, your spiritual center, commonly called you heart. Your well-connected, quite-remarkable, really-loaded Friend lives there, in perpetuity.
You need not go somewhere to find Him. Just look inside. He is there. He may be hidden behind boxes and stuff you stacked up in your heart — stuff like bitterness, conceit, worry, melancholy, disappointment, triumph — but He is there, and you can still find Him. He wants to be found and by you specifically. Love and earnest pleading are tools you have in your heart that can remove boxes and stuff that hide Him from immediate view. He’ll help you unpack, spring clean, make trips to the dump. Sincerity and fullness of effort He likes to see and hear.
Your mind is happy when you own it and The Resident of your heart has open comms with it. Own your mind before fear, envy, and anger can reach it. Do so even if they already are chewing away at some part of it. To pleasure your mind, to give it ease, to set it free from foreign creatures, to delectate all and sundry with demonstration of your competent generalship, remind your mind of this memory:
What should happen is happening.
The Navaratri festival is observed by contemplating on God for ten days and cleansing one’s self of all impurities, to experience the Divinity within. The penultimate day of the festival is dedicated to what is termed as Ayuda Puja (worship of weapons). The weapons to be worshipped are the divine powers within. When the Divine is worshipped in this way, one is bound to progress spiritually. On the contrary, the usual practice now is to treat the Divine and the devotee as separate from each other. This is wrong. The Divine is omnipresent and is in everyone and in every object. Realising this oneness, all actions should be done as an act of dedication to the Divine. Imagine the bliss that can be experienced in such a state of mind! It is essential to celebrate the festival in this sacred spirit. It is not enough to do this for only ten days during the Navaratri festival. It should become the rule all through one’s life, till the time one draws one’s life-breath.
- Sathya Sai Baba – Divine Discourse, October 14, 1994 / Daily Email, Sai Inspires: Subscription
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